http://www.anandtech.com/show/8796/...hnology-reaching-commercialization-stage-soon
Can't do interposer on a high-power ASIC, you'll cook your chip without it having direct contact to the heatsink. An alternative would be through-via stacking and sticking the RAM under the ASIC instead, but the need for thousands of vias to support the main ASIC would make the RAM die larger and less cost efficient than otherwise needed.
Why is this so urgent? It's basically the least urgent thing of all, pretty much. PS4 even has its HDD connected via USB3 for chrissakes... Consoles aren't I/O intensive, at all.
Well, a good 4x PCIe SSD today can do upwards of 1TB/s linear reads, meaning level load times would be pretty much instantaneous.
Gamers and developers. By 2017, friggen tablets will have graphics approaching the 4bone.
They can do something weaker than PS4, three years after PS4 launched, if they want to remain the marginalized laughing stock of the console industry for yet another half-decade. Wii was a freakish fluke that will never repeat itself. Obsolete hardware in the stationary console space as a recipe for success is not viable and never will be again. It's debatable if it will even work in a handheld, considering how high-powered today's devices are. Any phone you buy today will have a hardware that completely annihilates the 3DS even with both hands tied behind its back. It's increasingly difficult to see why one should pay lots of money for a wimpy underpowered Nintendo handheld with that in mind; all they have as an advantage these days are buttons and that's it.
Console HW predictions should go there. Business strategy should stay here.
This is a really depressing, and depressingly sobering outlook for an old Nintendo fan like me (I've owned Nintendo hardware since 1982.) Yes, chances are high - uncomfortably high - that you're completely right in that assessment.
Ever since online appeared on the scene in a big way, Nintendo has been like they were wishing this stupid fad would just go away, waving at it with a newspaper like a pesky fly so that they can go back to selling really overpriced cartridges to people. Alas, by now it should be bleeding obvious even to them that this is not going to happen. Nintendo online experience was absolutely pathetic with the wii (you couldn't even patch wii games post-release for chrissakes...), and it's only barely any better with the wuu. The nintendo online store is still not unified between their consoles, and it's a mess to navigate. Not to mention, slow download speeds and so on.
They could just crack open their billion-dollar war chest and buy the necessary expertise. Hire the kind of people they need. If they wanted to... *sighs*They said that one design win is "beyond gaming", so I'm assuming it's not about gaming. They claim one is x86 and the other is ARM. Very recently, AMD showed their ARM "Hadoop" platform for servers up and running, hence the assumption that the non-gaming design win is the ARM SoC.
One area where they're still sadly lacking on the wuu is voice chat. There's no universal VC, it is per-game only, and who knows if Nintendo even provides any services whatsoever for that, or if it's entirely up to game devs and publishers to provide the necessary tech and online servers to run it.
Furthermore, the wuupad has both microphone and speakers, but IIRC, you can't use those for voice chatting. This might be one area where wuu's absolutely rock bottom terrible hardware is coming back to bite Nintendo. Speculation - rampant perhaps - I know, but why wouldn't you be able to use the very hardware Nintendo built into the system for something as obvious as voice chatting? Well, the pad mic is probably fairly omnidirectional, so you'd need to do processing on the audio to make it of decent quality to send out; cancellation of other voice chatters and in-game sound effects and music for instance. Wuu's DSP just might not be up to that task, and perhaps the CPUs aren't either, although doesn't Nintendo reserve one entire CPU core - which for the most part does absolutely nothing whatsoever during gameplay other than maybe load some stuff off of the optical drive, if that's the main CPU's job rather than "Starlet II", or whatever the ARM helper core has been nicknamed this time around... Surely audio processing could be handled there, to relieve players of the need to wear a headset in addition to hold a bigass tablet with duplicate speakers and mic built-in in their hands...
As usual, Nintendo dodges their own ineptness with the excuse "it's to protect teh kiddies", but shit, you could have toggles in the parental controls section deciding if the wee bairns are allowed to voice chat in the wuu menus, or during in-game/matches, or just in the game lobby, or not at all. C'mon people, it's not rocket science, this stuff.
